Monthly Archives: June 2013

So what exactly IS wire data? We have all heard a lot about Machine data but most folks do not know what wire data is or how it can both augment your existing Operational Intelligence endeavor as well as provide better metrics than traditional APM solutions. Extrahop makes the claim that they are an Agentless solution. They are not unique in the claim but I believe they are pretty unique in the technology. It comes down to a case of trolling and polling. Example: A scripted SNMP process is “polling” a server to see if there are any retransmissions. Conversely Extrahop is Trolling for data as a passive network monitor and sees the retransmissions as they are occurring on the wire. Polling is great as long as the condition you are worried about is happening at the time you do the polling. It is similar to saying “Are you having retransmissions?” (SNMP Polling) vs. “I see you are having a problem with retransmissions”. Both are agentless but there is a profound difference in terms of the value each solution delivers.

Where an agent driven solution will provide insight into CPU, Disk and Memory, wire data will give you the performance metrics of the actual layer 7 applications. It will tell you what your ICA Latency as it is measured on the wire, it will tell you what SQL Statements are running slow and which ones are not, it will tell you which DNS records are failing. The key thing to understand is that Extrahop works as a surveillance tool and is not running on a specific server and asking WMI fields what their current values are. This is profoundly different than what we see in traditional tools in the last 10-12 years.

When Machine data meets Wire Data:I am now over 9 months into my Extrahop deployment and we have recently started a POC with Splunk and the first task I performed was to integrate Extrahop wire data into the Splunk Big Data back end. All I can say is that it has been like yin and yang. I am extremely pleased with how the two products integrate together and the fusion of wire data with machine data will give my organization a level of visibility that they have never had before. This is, in my opinion, the last piece to the Operational Intelligence puzzle.

In this post I want to talk about three areas where we have been able to see profound improvement in our environment and some of the ways we have leveraged Splunk and Extrahop to accomplish this.

How does data get from Extrahop to Splunk?Extrahop has this technology called Triggers. Basically, there is a mammoth amount of data flowing through your Extrahop appliances (up to 20GB per Second) and we are able to tap into that data as it is flowing by and send it to Splunk via Syslog. This allows me to tap into CIFS, SQL, ICA, MQSeries, HTTP, MySQL, NFS, ORACLE as well as other Layer 7 flows and allow me to send information from those flows (Such as Statement, Client IP, Server and Process Time for SQL) to Splunk where I can take advantage of their parsing and big data business intelligence. This takes data right off the wire and puts it directly into Splunk. Just like any Unix based system or Cisco device that is set to use Syslog, what I like about Extrahop is the ability to discriminate between what you send to Splunk and what you don’t send to Splunk.

Extrahop/Splunk Integration: SQL Server Queries

Grabbing SQL Queries and reporting on their performance:One of the most profound metrics we have noted since we started integrating Splunk and Extrahop was the ability to create a flow then cherry pick metrics from it. Below you will see a pair of Extrahop Triggers (the drivers for Splunk integration) the first trigger builds the flow by taking the DB.statement and the DB.procedure fields (pre-parsed on the wire) and creating a flow that you can then tap into when you send you syslog message in the next trigger.

The stmt (var stmt) variable, refers to the flow that we just created above, we will instantiate this flow and pull from it key metrics such as statement and procedure and couple it with the DB.tprocess and then tie in the process time of specific SQL Statements.

At the bottom you see the RemoteSyslog.info command that sends the data to Splunk (or KIWI with SQL, or what we call “skunk”).

Note below, I am NOT logging the database name but that is a trigger option in Extrahop if you have more than one database that uses similar table names. Also note, the condition if (DB.tprocess >=0). I am basically grabbing every database process. This measurement is in milliseconds so if you only wanted to check database queries that took longer than one second it would read if (DB.tprocess>=1000)

For myself, I assign both of these triggers to my Citrix XenApp servers and they are able to report on the database transactions that occur in my Citrix environment. Obviously, you can apply this triggers to your webservices, individual clients as well as the database servers themselves. In my case, I already had a device group for the XenApp servers.

This translates into the metrics you see below where Splunk automatically parses the data for me (YES!) and I am ready to start drilling into it to find problem queries, tables and databases.

Below you see how easy (well, I recommend the O’Reily “Regular Expressions” book) it is to now parse your wire data to provide the performance of specific queries. As you can see below, this allows you to see the performance of specific queries and get an understanding of how specific tables (and their corresponding indexes) are performing. The information you see in the graphic below can be delivered to Splunk in real-time and you can get this kind of insight without running SQL Profiler. If they are logging into the application with Windows credentials, you will have the user ID as well.

Also, you don’t have to know regex every time, you can save the query below as a macro and never have to type the regex ever again. You can also make that rex field a static column. I am NOT an regex guru, I managed to get every field parsed with a book and Google.

For me this now allows you to report on average process time by:

Database Server

User ID

Database Table (if you know a little regex)

Database

Client Subnet

Client IP Address

Individual Stored Procedure

Basically, once your data is indexed by Splunk’s Big Data back end, you have “baseball stats” as in it is crazy what you can report on (Example: who hit the most home runs from the left side of the plate in an outdoor stadium during the month of July). You can get every bit as granular as that in your reporting and even more.

Extrahop/Splunk Integration: DNS Errors

Few issues will be as maddening and infuriating as DNS Resolution issues. A windows client can pine for resolution for as long as five seconds. This can create some serious hourglass time for your end users and impact the performance of tiered applications. An errant mistake in a .conf file mapping to an incorrect host can be an absolute needle in a haystack. With the Splunk integration, (Extrahop’s own console does a great job of this as well) you can actually integrate the DNS lookup failures as the happen in real time and take them off the wire and into your Splunk Big Data platform. Below you see the raw data as it happens. (I literally went to a DOS prompt and started typing NSLOOKUP on random thought up names. (The great irony being that in this age of domain squatting, 1/3 of them actually came back!!!!). As my mentor and brother James “Jim” Smith once told me “if you have issues that are sometimes there and sometimes not there, it’s probably DNS” or “If DNS is not absolutely pristine, funny things happen” or my all-time favorite quote from my Brother Jim “Put that GOD DAMN PTR record in or I will kick your phucking ass!” Needless to say, my brother Jim is rather fond of the DNS Failure record keeping of Extrahop.

Below you see a very simple trigger that essentially logs the client IP, the DNS Server IP and the DNS Query that was attempted, the condition is set so that it is triggered in the event of an error.

Below is the resultant raw data.

As with the SQL Data we had above, we have more Parsing goodness because we are integrating the data into Splunk: Note the server cycling through the domain DNS Suffix thus doubling the number of failures.

So within the same vein as “baseball stats” you can report on DNS lookup failures by DNS Query (As you see above, those records who fail to be looked up most often) but you also have the ability to report on the following:

DNS Failures by Client IP and by DNS Query (Which server has the misconfigured conf file)

DNS Failures by DNS Server

DNS Failures by Subnet (bad DHCP setting?)

Proper DNS pruning and maintenance takes time, until Extrahop I cannot think of how I would monitor DNS failures outside of wireshark (Great tool but not much big data or business intelligence behind it). The ability to keep track of DNS failures will go a very long way in providing needed information to keep the DNS records tight. This will translate into faster logon times (especially if SRV lookups are failing) and better overall client-server and nth-tiered application performance.

Extrahop/Splunk Integration: Citrix Launch Times

One of the more common complaints of Citrix admins is the slow launch times. There are a number of variables that Extrahop can help you measure but for this section we will simply cover how to keep track of your launch times.

Below you see a basic trigger that will keep track of the load time and login time. I track both of these metrics as often, if the login time is 80-90% of the overall load time you likely need to take a look at group policies or possibly loopback processing. This can give you an idea of where to start. If you have a low logiinTime metric but a high loadTime metric it could be something Network/DNS related. You create this query and assign it to all XenApp Servers.

The Raw Data: Below you see the raw data, I am not getting a username yet, there is a trick to that I will cover later but you see below I get the Client Name, Client IP, Server IP and I would have my server name if my DNS was in order (luckily my brother Jim isn’t here)

As with the previous two examples, you now can start to generate metrics on application launch performance.

And once again with the baseball stats theme you can get the following metrics once your Extrahop data is integrated into Splunk:

Average Launch time by UserName

Average Launch time by Client Name

Average Launch time by Client IP

Average Launch time by Customer Subnet (using some regex)

Average Launch time by Application (as you see above)

Average Launch time by XenApp Server (pinpoint a problem XenApp server)

Conclusion:While I did not show the Extrahop console in this post the Extrahop console is quite good, I wanted to show how you could integrate wire data into your Splunk platform and make it available to you along with your machine data. While you are not going to see CPU, Disk IOPS or Memory utilization on the wire, you will seem some extremely telling and valuable data. I believe that all systems and system related issues will manifest themselves on the wire at some point. An overloaded SQL Server will start giving you slower ProcessTime metrics. A flapping switch in an MDF at a remote site might start showing slower Launch Times in Citrix and a misconfigured .conf file may cause lookup failures for your tiered applications that you run. These are all metrics that may not manifest themselves with agent driven tools but you can note them on the wire. Think of Extrahop as your “Pit Boss” engaging in performance surveillance of your overall systems.

I have found the integration between Splunk and Extrahop gives me a level of visibility that I have never had in my career. This is the perfect merger of two fantastic data sources.

In the future I hope to cover integration for HTTP, CIFS as well as discuss the security benefits of sending wire data to Splunk.

Thanks for reading.

John M. Smith

Useful Regex statements

Getting the Subnet ID (24 bit Mask)
This is the REX statement that will let you query for a 24 bit subnet ID. This will let you check Citrix Latency and Load/Launch times by Subnet within a customer’s network.

The REGEX below will allow you to get the actual table that an insert command is updating. This could be useful to see if SQL write actions are not performing as expected. This REX will parse out the table name so that you can check the performance of specific tables.

| rex field=_raw “Statement=insert INTOs(?<Table>.[^s]+)”

Getting the Table Name within a SELECT statement:The REX statement below allows you to get the table that a select statement is running against. Mapping the performance by Table name may give you an indication that you need to re-index.| rex field=_raw “[fF][rR][oO][mM]s(?<Table>.[^s]+)”